


Bloodworm

by ToreyTaylor



Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood, Blood and Gore, Death, Gen, Macabre, Sick and Twisted, gruesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-30
Updated: 2013-06-03
Packaged: 2017-12-13 10:38:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/823341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToreyTaylor/pseuds/ToreyTaylor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blood is spilling and guts are flying in the rurul town of Sanderson, Minnesota. No one is safe from the Bloodworm...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Fall

**Author's Note:**

> I dreamed about this a couple of years ago and decided to turn it into a story.

Sierra had hated blood ever since the day bad things involving the sticky red substance began, so when she'd fallen in the forest outside of town and grazed her knee, the sixteen year old blonde almost fainted at the sight of it. She was a keen jogger and a typical teenager who obsessed in keeping fit and looking good, and the thought of anyone seeing her dignity going out of the window was almost as intense as the sick feeling crawling its way up her stomach. Well, not quite as intense since that feeling of repugnance was quite unlike anything she'd ever experienced.

Bad things had been happening in the small rural town of Sanderson nestled between the mountain ranges and lush forests of Minnesota, things that involved blood, and lots of it. Whole families had been ripped apart inside their own homes and something that really shouldn't have happened did happen; the gruesome mess of at least two of the homes had made the national news. The rooms were coated with blood and gore and in the corner of a living room lay a corpse. Its legs had been torn off and were lay God knows where and its innards were splayed on the floor. Above its torn face lay a mass of thick blonde hair that wasn't really blonde anymore as it had been streaked with blood, and Sierra could just make out two bulging eyeballs that looked like their last gaze had been one of the purest fright and agony.

At least ten million people had seen it, apparently, and Sierra was one of them. It was a late Thursday evening and she was tired, weary and wanted to get into bed even though she probably wouldn't have been able to sleep. She lived in Sanderson, the town dubbed by some newsreaders as 'the town where real nightmares begin'. She knew what had happened as it had only occurred that day, but Sierra didn't realise the full extent of the massacre in 64 Garland Road until she turned on the news at eleven pm. It should never have been allowed to be aired. But it had been, Sierra had unwillingly seen it and now she had to deal with the fact that just a trickle of blood petrified her and probably always would. They'd tried to keep it as secret as possible and had succeeded for a couple of weeks. Now the whole of America knew, possibly the world.

Her knee was smeared with the red sticky residue that had tormented her dreams and waking hours for weeks on end. In a panic, she wiped the blood quickly away with her hands like it was a large and venomous spider, but further panic ensued when her blood had spread onto her hands as well. She released a small yelp and then felt silly about it. Everybody bled sometimes and whatever had happened in town was obviously the doing of some crazy murderer or something. And he could be out here, right now. Now she'd opened an even bigger can of worms in her head. What if it was a murderer? Oh man.

She hoisted herself up, wincing at the searing pain in her knee as she did so, and rode home in agony as quickly as she could. The area of forest she'd fallen in was now empty except for the birds high in the trees and tiny balls that looked like insect eggs which were slowly writhing around on a spot of blood that had dripped to the floor.


	2. The Silent Terror

"What have you done to your leg?!" squealed Sierra's equally squeamish mom when she came through the front door. "Wash yourself up while I get a band-aid for that."

Her mom came back with more than a band-aid. She'd got in her hands a medium sized box that was full of antiseptic creams, sprays and other weird medical products. Most of them hadn't even been used but Sierra's mom always told her 'just in case, Sierra. Just in case.' Sierra realised that it wasn't just the awful incidents in the town that had made her so afraid of blood, but her mom's constant worries and 'important' talks about all things medical. She never understood why a woman such as her mom would be so knowledgeable about such things - she was, after all, an assistant accountant for a major firm in town, and not a nurse. She had no reason to be, really. And by this time, Sierra had had enough about it. No wonder she was so squeamish!

"Are you all washed up?" asked her mom as she plonked the stuff down on the small table in front of the couch. Her voice sounded slightly strained, like she was trying to prevent panicky tones from slipping through and alarming her daughter.

"Of course I am. With you as a mother, it would be stupid not to be."

"Sierra, what are you implying?" asked her mom, arms folded and brow furrowed in annoyance.

Sierra sighed. "Nothing, nothing."

After the clean-up, Sierra realised the cause of the pain. A small gash on her knee was hidden beneath the smears of blood, and it wasn't even deep. In fact, it was more of a graze. But to Sierra, the pain felt like something more. It felt like something was clawing at her knee, boring into it. Sierra had the urge to ask her mom for reassurance and so she did, without resisting at all. In this instance, she was grateful for her deep pool of knowledge on such matters.

"Mom, it doesn't _feel_ like a graze. It feels like a deep cut or something. Is it normal for it to hurt so much?"

"Of course," her mom answered immediately. "I've had some grazes in my time and whoever tells you that a graze is nothing is lying. Put one of these special band-aids on it," - she waved a box of antiseptic band-aids in her hand - "and just try and forget it's there. These ones'll do wonders for that graze. Trust me. These are the sorts the hospitals would use."

That night, as Sierra was watching the only channel that wasn't hosting the news at that very moment, she wept in her bed, cradling her knee as she lay in a not quite foetal position. She whimpered lightly so as not to wake her mom who was sleeping in the next room but as the pain increased it was getting even harder to tame her pained cries. She daren't peel off the plaster for fear of what she might find there. It definitely didn't feel like a graze anymore. It was throbbing, not only on the surface, but deeper inside her knee, too. Not only a throb either, but the unnatural feeling that something was squirming around in there, feasting on her flesh in tiny nibbles. This wasn't just a graze, she thought.

She muted the television with the remote control instead of turning it off as the thought of plunging her room into total darkness was too much to bear right now. The darkness was bad; that's what she thought as a child. A time where monsters could roam freely, even in the confines of a bedroom. And if there was something squirming about in her knee, what would it do in the darkness?

_Anything_ , Sierra thought. _It could do anything at all._

After tossing and turning and crying out in pain, Sierra finally drifted into an uneasy sleep, the bluish tones of the television casting calming light throughout the room. An hour into sleep, the news crept silently onto the screen. The newsreader held a look of deep concern in her features and this was coupled with a look of queasiness and distress. What Sierra couldn't hear was her voice, which was telling the nation that all victims of these grotesque attacks had previously been walking in the forests surrounding Sanderson and that there was evidence of something non-human at the root cause of all the incidents.

As if sensing the newsreaders panic, even though she possibly couldn't, Sierra clutched her knee tightly with both hands as she continued to sleep.


	3. Blood Feast

The pain had worsened incredibly by the next morning. It wove in and out of her fragmented nightmares about dark forests and houses painted in blood and people with gaping holes in their bodies like the talons of a hungry eagle piercing the flesh of its prey.

She woke with a start and immediately cried out in pain. Her instant thought was that this wasn't normal and it made her panic, so much so that she jumped out of bed, and she quite unexpected the sheer amount of pain that erupted into her knee. She fell to the floor in a heap.

Her mom rushed into her room and knelt beside her sobbing daughter. Placing her hands around her, she was able to lift Sierra back onto the bed.

"What happened? Are you alright?" she asked.

"Mom, I'm in agony and I'm scared!" she wept. "It's not normal! What about if I'm dying?!"

"You're not dying, sweetheart!" Her mom didn't exactly sound reassuring, Sierra thought. To her, it sounded like she was putting a brave face on it. She could read her mom like a book, and sometimes that wasn't a good thing. "It's just a graze! Maybe it just needs some fresh air on it. Why don't you take the band-aid off for a bit, see if it helps?"

"I guess I could try, but what if…what if I find something really bad there?" Sierra moaned.

"Sierra…"

After a few moments, her mom left her room and shouted from the bottom of the stairs that she'd be making breakfast if she needed her. Sierra peeled back the sticky surface of the band-aid from her wound slowly, because ripping one right off would hurt almost as much as her cut and she didn't want that. It still clung to her skin, though, making the surrounding area painful anyway.

She felt a horrible warm gooey thing stick to her hand and yelped in disgust. She peered down and saw a dark red glob of her blood on her hand. At first she didn't realise that the pain from her knee had subsided, all she could feel was nausea and surprise. It was the same colour as a blood clot, but it was throbbing and moving minutely. Now it seemed like a leech or a worm of some kind.

_A bloodworm._

She shook her hand desperately but the bloodworm clung to her skin, its open mouth sucking painfully on her hand. The pain from her knee hadn't gone away at all, it had just moved to a different place. Where the bloodworm was, the pain was. It had been sucking all the blood from her knee before and now it was doing the same to her hand. As the blood drained slowly from her hand the bloodworm grew in pulses and waves and her hand had changed colour from a rosy pink to a deathly light grey.

What had happened to those families killed in their own home was happening here. Deep down, she knew that all along. It was the pessimist inside her. She screamed and she didn't stop.


	4. Fire Kills All

"Sierra!"

Her mom was stood in the threshold of her bedroom door, an apron round her neck and a sweet aroma of waffles clinging to her. Sierra was thrashing about before her eyes shaking her hand wildly, which seemed to have gone a funny colour. There was something large, long and blood-red hanging off it and she was screaming, her eyes not daring to leave her hand.

She darted over to her, grabbed her arm and made it still. The red thing wobbled and swayed and pulsed like something alive. Was it alive? Also, was it growing? It clung to Sierra's skin even after it was violently shaken, seemingly not wanting to let go, and it was making an awful squelching noise like it was sucking blood, and not only sucking it, but craving it.

"Mom, help me!" she wailed. "Help me, it's killing me! Get it off me! Get it off!"

Her hand was a shade of greyish pink, the colour you'd expect to see a person close to death change to, and the bloodworm continued to grow, pulsing as it gulped down fresh blood. She didn't think it would stop until it had sucked out all the blood in her daughter's hand and she as her mother couldn't let that happen. She ran forward, grabbing the bloody mass with both hands. She cringed for a split second as her senses imagined its texture. She expected it to squirt its liquid in all directions as she squeezed it with both hands, but instead it was hard, sticky and warm. And it wouldn't budge, no matter how much she squeezed and pulled.

She felt it loosen then and with it came a tearing sound. A shriek from Sierra startled her, but she wouldn't let go. Her daughter's hand was nothing more than a mangled pulp as the bloodworm tore off the dead-like skin. Sierra reeled back and fell onto the floor screaming hysterically as the bloodworm slithered crazily into her mom's sleeve. It tore the sleeve as it went up and latched onto her shoulder, still growing.

Hardly thinking, she rammed her shoulder into the wall so hard that a cascade of plaster from the ceiling rained down on her. There was an explosion of pain that made her bite down on her lip making it bleed and her eyes water and sting but her main concern was the bloodworm. She could feel a hot, sticky sensation on her sleeve and it repulsed her. She wanted to throw up.

Hesitantly, she looked down. She heaved once and forced a smile. That smile was as hard as lifting the heaviest dumbbells. She was told that smiling suppressed the gag reflex and she couldn't be sick, not now. The bloodworm had seemed to have exploded from the impact of human flesh and solid plaster squashing it. She slid down the wall sobbing and panting. Sierra, still losing blood, crawled over to her, her face etched with agony and surprise.

"T-thank you, mom. You s-saved us b-b-both."

"Oh, Sierra. Don't talk. Save your…strength. I'll call the…ambulance."

In the ambulance, both mother and daughter were cared for. Sierra had her hand wrapped in gauze to stem the blood and her mom was lying in a bed on her side, her badly bruised, but thankfully not broken, collar bone facing upwards.

"Would you be able to tell us what happened?" the paramedic asked Sierra's mom.

"You wouldn't believe us even if we told you," she replied. "But let's just say, I think we've solved the town's grizzly goings on."

"Don't let anyone go into that forest ever again," added Sierra. "It's a bad place. A very bad place."

One month later, after extensive but purposeful fire damage, the forest that used to be such an idyllic place surrounding the even more idyllic town of Sanderson was no more. Sierra felt bittersweet about it. It was such a beautiful forest, but she realised that even the most dazzling things held the darkest of secrets.

The End


End file.
